Michał Pierzgalski
This version: November 18, 2018 (This document is a work in progress)
See the course syllabus that is available via Moodle e-learning platform: https://moodle.uni.lodz.pl/?lang=en
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JFKfCKntFD7IqTDogMdiQvNAYtbFWV1jnX3jewbepsQ/edit?usp=sharing
What is the most fundamental feature/principle of democracy?
In science, statements are broken into two main categories:
Positive political science is the branch of political science that concerns the description and explanation of political phenomena.
Positive statements are either true or false. Before we check whether or not positive statement is true, we call it a hypothesis.
When a hypothesis is positively tested we can say that statement is a theorem or corollary.
– (Schumpeter, 1976)
Election is simply a choice. To elect means “to choose or make a decision”.
IOWA judges selection: https://www.dropbox.com/s/8nrcissdbhym9df/JNP_KnowYourCourts_2015.pdf?dl=0
Figure: Kleroterion - a randomization device used by the Athenians during the period of democracy to select citizens to the boule, to most state offices, to the nomothetai, and to court juries.
The Ekklesia (People’s Assembly) became the legislative body of Athens. It was the general meeting of all citizens — males of Athenian origin over the age of 20.
With a few exceptions, all appointments in Athens were made by lot or by rotation to equalize everyone’s opportunity to hold office.
Figure: Athenian democracy - the structure of government (Tangian, 2014)
A city-state:
A nation state (or nation-state):
Constitutional Convention of 1787 (USA) - created a constitution for the first of the large representative democracies. By 1787, the population of the United States was already greater than that of all of Ancient Greece.
By the middle-and certainly by the end-of the nineteenth century the idea of democracy in the city-state had been entirely displaced by the idea of representative democracy in the nation-state.
Main features:
Main features:
“… a twentieth-century political system … [is democratic] … to the extent that its most powerful collective decision makers are selected through fair, honest, and periodic elections in which candidates freely compete for votes and in which virtually all the adult population is eligible to vote.”
“Governments produced by elections may be inefficient, corrupt, shortsighted, irresponsible, dominated by special interests, and incapable of adopting policies demanded by the public good. These qualities may make such governments undesirable but they do not make them undemocratic. Democracy is one public virtue, not the only one …”.
According to Montesquieu:
[R]epublican government is that in which the body, or only a part of the people, is posessed of the supreme power,
… and thus may be either a democratic or an aristocratic republic.
As for the republican form of government, some emphasize “rule of law”: John Adams described a republic as
The election is considered to be ‘general’ because all citizens have the right to vote - regardless of gender, income, religion, profession or political beliefs. They usually must, however, be aged 18 or over on election day.
The election is ‘secret’ - a voter’s choices in an election or a referendum are both secret and anonymous.
The election is ‘direct’ because the voters elect without an intermediate body.
The election is ‘free’ because citizens may not be influenced or put under pressure regarding their decision on whom to support.
The election is ‘equal’ because each voter is allowed to cast the same numbers of votes.
In fact, it is not usually true that every vote carries the same weight. We will discuss this important issue later.
\[**1265**\]
Parliament established. It contains 2 chambers. One is ‘the Lords’ - unelected aristocrats. The other is ‘the Commons’. These Members of Parliament (MPs) are smaller landowners and are elected only by male landowners.
\[**1832**\]
Great Reform Act. Before this time only landowners could vote for MPs to sit in the House of Commons. This meant 1 in 7 men could vote. (440,000 people) After 1832 the male urban middle classes gain the vote, and so the electorate increases to 1 in 5 men (650,000 people). (...)
\[**1867**\]
Second Reform Act. This extends the vote to the skilled urban male working class. The electorate increases to 1 in 3 men.
\[**1884**\]
Third Reform Act. The vote is now given to working class men in the countryside. The electorate is now 2 out of 3 men.
\[**1918**\]
Representation of the People Act. Almost all men over 21 years old, and women over 30 years old now have the vote.
\[**1928**\]
Effectively all women and men over 21 now have the right to vote.
What prevents election from being fair and free?
The electorate may be poorly informed about issues or candidates due to lack of freedom of the press, lack of objectivity in the press due to state or corporate control, or lack of access to news and political media.
Freedom of speech may be limited by the state, favoring certain viewpoints or state propaganda.
Electoral fraud involve e.g. manipulating electoral districts boundaries, exclusion of opposition candidates from eligibility for office, and manipulating thresholds, those in power may arrest or assassinate candidates, outlaw competitors, harass or beat campaign workers, or intimidate voters with violence, tampering with the election mechanism, confusing or misleading voters about how to vote, violation of the secret ballot, tampering with voting machines, destruction of legitimately cast ballots, voter suppression, voter registration fraud, failure to validate voter residency, fraudulent tabulation of results, use of physical force or verbal intimation at polling places, persuading candidates into not standing against them, blackmailing, bribery, carousel voting etc.
Carousel voting is a method of vote rigging in elections, used e.g. in Russia and Ukraine. Voters are driven around to cast ballots multiple times. The term "carousel" refers to the circular movement made by the voters, from one polling station to the next, and so on.
Voting is a way to make collective decisions, that is, decisions that are made by a group. There are also other methods to make group decisions - e.g. consensus, random process, sortition, contest.
Consensus is a process for group decision-making. It is a method by which an entire group of people can come to an agreement. The input and ideas of all participants are gathered and synthesized to arrive at a final decision acceptable to all.
Consensus may not be efficient way to make decisions when the group of people who try to select the best option is very large. Consensus may take much more time than voting.
In voting, everyone expresses their will/opinion (in the form of a vote), which means that voting produces certainty regarding the distribution of preferences. The decision rule is applied to this distribution to determine the collective decision.
For example, in the case of a simple majority vote, the option with the most votes becomes the collective decision.
There are many different methods of selecting using a vote - we discuss some of them in this course.
Voting has been used as a feature of democracy since the 6th century BC, when democracy was introduced by the Athenians.
However, in Athenian democracy, voting was seen as the least democratic among methods used for selecting public officials, and was little used, because elections were believed to inherently favor the wealthy and well-known over average citizens.
Assemblies open to all citizens, and selection by lot (known as sortition), as well as rotation of office seems to be more democratic for Athenians.
Sortition (also known as allotment or the drawing of lots) is the selection of decision makers by lottery. The decision-makers are chosen as a random sample from a larger pool of candidates.
In ancient Athenian democracy, sortition was the primary method for appointing officials, and its use was widely regarded as a principal characteristic of democracy.
One of the earliest recorded elections in Athens was a plurality vote that it was undesirable to "win": in the process called ostracism, voters chose the citizen they most wanted to exile for ten years.
Most elections in the early history of democracy were held using plurality voting or some variant, but as an exception, the state of Venice in the 13th century adopted the system we now know as approval voting to elect their Great Council.
Free and fair elections are a central feature of, and a neccesery condition for, representative democracy.
An electoral system is a set of rules that determine how elections and referendums are conducted and how their results are determined.
A voting system or electoral system is a winner-selection method by which voters make a choice between options, often in an election or on a policy referendum.
In the broad sense of the term, the electoral system is a set of laws that regulate electoral competition between candidates or parties or both.
Electoral system comprises three essential elements, namely:
Electoral formula is the most important element of a voting system and usually the name of the electoral system is derived from the name of electoral formula.
We can distinguish two types of ballots - categorical (voters are allowed to choose only one candidate or party) and preferential (voters can rank each candidate in order of preference).
In some voting systems voters are eligible to use both categorical and preferential vote, e.g. voters choose between parties (categorical) and then rank candidates on the chosen party list.
Figure: A state (USA, Texas) ballot paper
Social choice theory
The study of formally defined voting systems is called social choice theory or voting theory, a subfield of political science, economics and mathematics.
Social choice theory is concerned with the study of group decision making processes.